“If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems — people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets — it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."”
"Verse Chronicle," The Nation (23 February 1946); reprinted as "Bad Poets" in Poetry and the Age (1953)
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Randall Jarrell 215
poet, critic, novelist, essayist 1914–1965Related quotes
The Music of Poetry (24 February 1942) the third W. P. Ker memorial lecture delivered in the University of Glasgow
“We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.”
Source: The French Lieutenant's Woman
Quote from a 1962 essay by Andre; as quoted in ' Objects Are What We Aren't' https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/02/26/objects-are-what-we-arent/, by Andy Battaglia; The Parish Review, February 26, 2015
Einar in "Shepherds' Meet"
Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book One, Part I: Icelandic Pioneers
Nobel Prize autobiography (1998)
Context: The world is full of intelligent, well-meaning people who, for one reason or another, did not attend university but are nonetheless well-read and educated. Out there on the prairie lost opportunities of youth were the rule rather than the exception, and I slowly became disabused of the myth of the Bright Young Thing and have not believed in it since.
"Answers to Questions," from Mid-Century American Poets, edited by John Ciardi, 1950 [p. 171]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)